ABSTRACT
But our original purpose of making geopolitics accessible to the lay reader has remained. The very definition of what constitutes the field has been problematic. In the years since Fred and I began to write the textbook, many new and "post" terms of discourse have emerged: new geopolitics, a new century, a new world order, global change, postSoviet, post Cold War, post-modern. The idea of change is in the air, almost as though we define our era of world relations as a tautology: it is called a new era because it is new. Something is behind us, we are now "post'', but what is this new world we are entering? What defines the change? Has anything indeed really changed?
